"I was taught – and I agree – that you should only translate into your mother tongue (assuming you are raised monolingual). I have occasionally translated into Arabic, but I always get the translation checked by a native speaker, and I always feel that what I have done lacks style; it might be grammatically correct, but there are no subtleties or nuances. Translation, particularly literary translation, is more than knowing the target language well, it is about cultural familiarity, about knowing the resonances and connotations words might have, being aware of what the readership will understand as well as what the writer intended. That deeper knowledge cannot be learnt from books.
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I can think of many great authors who have chosen to write in a language they have not learnt from birth. Samuel Beckett chose to write in French (after years of living in Paris), and Milan Kundera now does too (again after a long period of living in France). Then of course there was the extraordinary Joseph Conrad, for whom English was a fourth language (after Russian, Polish and French), mastered in his twenties. Bahrain has its own example in Ebrahim Al Arrayedh, who wrote extensively in Arabic, although he only learnt it as a teenager when he moved to Bahrain from India. The Saudi novelist Ahmed Abodehman writes in French. (Eleiva recently told me about Kapka Kassabova, a Bulgarian author who initially wrote a novel and some poetry in English just to practise the language – but won awards for them!)
Beckett turned to French because he felt in French he could write 'without style' – it made his writing very spare (and he translated most of his own works into English himself).
Is there a difference between living for a long time in country other to that of one's birth and choosing to write in the language of that culture (for whatever reason), and writing in another language while still surrounded by your mother tongue?"
For more, visit:
http://battutabahrain.blogspot.com/2007/10/stepmother-tongues.html
